Croft (2000: 65) - Noun, verb and adjective are not ... - grandionline.net

The theory defines universal prototypes for the three major parts of speech, butdoes not define boundaries for these categories. Boundaries are aspects oflanguage-particular grammatical categories, determined by distributionalanalysis”The typological universals do not predict the exact behaviour of individuallanguages; rather, they predict that a language will fit somewhere in the pattern ofvariation allowed by typological marking theoryThe behavioural potential criterion specifies that the unmarked memberdisplays at least as wide a range of grammatical behaviour as the markedmember. The behavioural potential criterion is again formulated as animplicational universal. It allows for the possibility of marked members […] tohave the same inflectional possibilities as unmarked members […] in somelanguage. It excludes the possibility of marked members having moreinflectional possibilities than unmarked members.The behavioural potential criterion also allows for the limited or “defective”behaviour of the marked member of a category […] without having to committo the marked member being “in” or “not in” the category in a universaltypologicalsense.